


palms, softly opening

by Chill_with_Penguins



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Mature Adult Decisions?, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Canon Compliant, Some angst, Team as Family, but i love it anyway, but it's mostly background, more likely than you think, oliver wants his life to be a college au, this fic is a MESS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:06:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24186352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chill_with_Penguins/pseuds/Chill_with_Penguins
Summary: “Hey, guys, we have some guests,” Felicity says, spinning around in her chair. Oliver and Diggle straighten up immediately, both fingering their weapons as they scan the perimeter, looking for some villain who’s infiltrated the Lair and taken her hostage. Instead, they see Oliver’s friends and sister standing in the corner, arms crossed and looking unimpressed.“Really? This is what you’ve been doing with your time, Ollie?” Laurel asks. “I mean, I get different coping mechanisms, but vigilantism is a felony."---On my computer this story is titled "A world in which people learn from their mistakes, communicate like actual fucking adults, and understand that family is what you make it."(I guess I wrote Arrow domestic fluff?)
Relationships: John Diggle & Oliver Queen & Felicity Smoak, Oliver Queen & Everyone, Oliver Queen & Maseo Yamashiro, Oliver Queen & Tatsu Yamashiro, Oliver Queen & Thea Queen, Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak
Comments: 5
Kudos: 70





	palms, softly opening

When he was in college, Oliver had taken an Intro to Viking Mythology class. It was supposed to be an easy A, a big lecture class where he could glide by and fulfill an English requirement while staring at the hot professor. 

Instead, he found himself being oddly drawn to the subject. Something about these stories drew him in: the cyclic nature, the inevitable fall, the way everyone played their parts even knowing how it’d all end. (The way he played a party boy, evening knowing his future was a solid stone wall of the company, even knowing there was no way out--)

If you asked him why he liked the stories so much, he would’ve grinned up at you, something carefully careless in the shrug of his shoulders. He made sure all you could see was the red in his eyes, made sure no one looked past that drunken stupor into the flint that lay below it. 

“I dunno,” he would’ve said. “They’re batshit, you know? Like something you’d come up with when you’re high.”

( _ They make sense _ , he thought but never said. He shrugged and grinned and downed another shot, another girl, and carefully didn’t think of his family’s company stretched out over the city like Asgard, of the unspoken rules and codes and lies all his father’s friends seemed to dance around.)

On the island, Oliver thinks about this, about himself, trapped on this deathtrap of a rock, of his father’s body under a grave of stones and the way it felt to kill and that fucking Intro to Viking Mythology class and laughs long into the night. Slade glances up and over, a hint of concern under the overwhelming frustration on his face, and knows better than to ask. 

  
  


A secret Oliver never breathes to anyone except himself, and even then only years later in the dead of night: he’s grateful for the storm. For the island. For everything that came after. 

Oliver, strong and scarred and healing from so much pain in his life, pictures himself sitting in the rooms of those CEOs whose windows he swings through now, aiming threats like they’re nothing and trying, trying, trying to fix violence with more violence, blood with more blood. 

He pictures himself in a suit, going on business trips and to galas and living such a fucking pointless life, and chokes on something between a laugh and a sob. He’ll take the island and the torture and the nightmares over that. At least in his hellish life, he knows what’s real. 

  
  


“What are you doing?” Diggle says, his whole face flat and unimpressed.  Even after years of working for A.R.G.U.S., he still can’t seem to pull one over on the ex-soldier. Some days, Oliver appreciates that. He gets lost in his work often enough to see the use in having someone he can’t fool. 

Some days, he wishes there was something, anything, he could say to make the other man just leave him the fuck alone. 

“Plotting,” Oliver deadpans. It’s not technically a lie, but he’s hoping if he says it with enough sarcasm it’ll come across as one. 

Diggle stares him down, unblinking. “Did you think I was joking when I said you need to keep me in the loop?” 

“No,” Oliver grumbles, “you made that perfectly clear.” The rant from last week is still echoing in his head, actually. 

“Then tell me now, clearly, what you’re doing. I’m not a sidekick, and I’m not a pawn. If you want someone to follow your plans around blindly, pick a new partner.”

Oliver’s mouth twists in frustration. “Fine,” he bites out. He lays out the blueprints, the weapons, the target. 

Diggle nods just once, calm and clear knowing in those eyes. “You forgot the sewer access.”

Oliver opens his mouth to protest that  _ no _ , he did  _ not  _ do something as dumb as forgetting the sewer access, thank you very much; his eyes are already sliding across the paper to find his notes on it and--oh. He was thinking of last week’s job. 

Maybe Thea was onto something with that whole “more than two hours of sleep a night” thing. 

Diggle, the jackass, somehow manages to look both serene and smug. Oliver sighs under his breath and pushes the chair to face away from the desk. Partners, right? He can do this. He used to be able to do this. Diggle is useful enough that he can make himself learn again. “What do you suggest?”

  
  


Felicity is a whirlwind of energy, the kind of force Oliver hadn’t even realized he was missing until she was on the team. She brings a kind of bright enthusiasm to everything she does, from uploading apps he’s never heard of to his phone to cracking citywide firewalls to bringing plant after plant into the Lair, as Diggle keeps jokingly calling it. She looks like a woman and feels like a force of nature. 

Oliver imagines her on the island, the one that he knew during some days in the last year he spent there, when everything was calm and quiet and sunlight was shafting through the trees while wildlife rustled around him. He imagines her on the beach for the bonfires and on the bluffs during the massive thunderstorms that would roll in, lighting lining the horizon like quicksilver or wildfire, and he smiles. 

Felicity has a glint of steel in her eyes, her smile. He recognizes it from the mirror, years and ages and lifetimes ago, from when he was just a dumb frat boy straining against his inevitable future marching ever closer. He looks at her uncalloused hands, at her strong smile and black thumb, and he gets the feeling that they are two possibilities of the same too-big soul, the same too-fierce personality. Savage instinct and forces of nature have no place in this city, in this world, and yet here they are, hiding together in the darkness and fighting to bring a little light in. 

He watches her quietly, carefully, and suspects that if she had been on that boat he would be the lesser of the two of them. 

  
  


On the island, in between battles and captures and tortures, in between more rock graves and a fiery plane crash and the end of everything he was beginning to call his own, he imagines going back to college, doing it right this time. He makes bargains, in his mind:  _ I’ll write three history papers every night. I’ll take an exam every day. I’ll never go to another party, never take another sip of alcohol.  _

_ I’ll do anything. I swear, I’ll do anything. Please let me go back.  _

He doesn’t. Nothing happens. 

During the harsher moments, when everything seems to be slipping away, he imagines that his whole life, everything that’s happening around him, are just slides on a powerpoint in front of some massive lecture class.  _ And what do we see here? Anyone? That’s correct, this is an example of the cost of a wasted life.  _

He watches flaming wreckage streak across the sky and imagines a physics professor standing in front of it all, laser pointer in hand. During some of the battles, the later ones, when he’s used to the violence enough that it doesn’t trip him up but not so tired it takes everything he has, he thinks about military history, about the weight of grief and its themes in literature. In the streets of Hong Kong, he thinks about global learning, about the languages he knows, the foods and cultures and cities he’s tried and tasted and wandered through. He thinks about the power of his body; about this collection of skin and bone and muscle and pounding blood that has carried him halfway across the world and then some, that has saved his life again and again; he thinks about his fingers on a bowstring and his feet pounding on the pavement and his pulse throbbing in his ears and wonders what he might’ve done differently, if there were someone to tell him about these things when he was younger. If there was someone to tell him to be thankful for the miracles humans perform every day. 

Oliver wanders across the world, through pirate ships and Russian mobs and secret agencies with even more secret agendas. He walks through Lian Yu and Hong Kong and Tokyo, through back roads in England and back alleys in Prussia and the dim-light pubs in South Africa. He thinks. He wonders. 

  
  


When he goes back to Starling City, he explicitly ignores his instructions. Maseo is unsurprised to find him at the party with Thea, and Oliver can’t say he didn’t see that rant coming. But it’s not until later, when he’s sitting quietly in between pillars of the offshoot university library in Starling City, that Maseo finds him and sits down with a heavy sigh. The shaded stone is cool underneath him, the city streets unnaturally quiet in the early morning hours. 

“Why are you here? We have a mission.”

“You have a mission. I have a home. It’s five blocks that way,” Oliver says. His words are faintly slurred, but he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol. Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation. Or the heartbreak. 

Maseo stares at him, no sympathy in his eyes. There’s no room for softness anymore, not in either of them. Oliver doesn’t blame him for the hard look in his eyes. If his kid’s life was resting on this, he’d have no time for a weepy ex-billionaire’s homecoming either. 

“Why are you  _ here _ , Oliver? If you’re so desperate to go home, if home is so close, then what are you doing here?”

Oliver stares out at the street. The light turns green, but there are no cars lined up and waiting to go. This early, Starling is deserted. 

“It’s a library,” he says, feeling somehow distant from himself. “You know, a building with books?”

“I wasn’t aware you knew how to read.”

He looks over, ready to scowl, and sees one corner of Maseo’s lip twitch slightly. “I wasn’t aware you know how to joke.”

“Well then, I guess we’re both full of surprises tonight.”

“I guess we are,” Oliver says. They sit in silence for a moment, but there are words welling up inside him, and he’s too… tired? Drained? Sick of holding them in? He’s too something, and they come spilling out. “I used to be in college, you know. I was going to get a degree, take over my father’s company.”

Maseo gives him an impatient look. “Yes, Oliver, I know. Your family’s company, their fortune, all of that would be yours. It’s not. You should move on.”

“I didn’t take it seriously then,” he continued quietly. “It was all parties and sorority girls and pregaming. But I kept thinking, on the island, about what I would give to get to go back. To do it right.”

For the first time, Maseo looks amused. “You want to go back to school?” he asks, actually laughing this time. He’s never heard Maseo laugh before. Oliver swallows back the  _ yes, please god I’d give anything, anything to have books and school be the top of my concerns again  _ that’s trying to crawl its way out of his throat. 

“Yeah,” he says instead, shrugging as if it doesn’t mean anything. (It means everything. It’s this fragile, burning dream, this beautiful alternate world: a world where Oliver’s biggest stress is that he might fail a class.)

Maseo stops laughing, watching as he stands, something unfamiliar in those dark eyes. 

“Come on,” Oliver says, trying and failing at a smile. “Walker won’t wait forever.”

“You’re the one always making us late,” Maseo mutters, but he follows. He always does. 

  
  


Because the people around him have more than one brain cell each and actually communicate on occasion, it doesn’t take long for Thea and Laurel and Tommy to figure it out. Diggle and Oliver are on their way back from a mission, covered in a slimy kind of mud they’re trying very hard not to think too hard about, laughing and cracking insults as they walk in. Their earpieces are shot to all shit--some kind of EMP the guy had activated, apparently thinking that he could lay a trap for the Arrow which he was convinced was an automaton, so they haven’t heard anything from Felicity in a while. They’re still taking shots at each other when they walk in and hear Felicity interrupt, her voice doing that hitching thing it does when she gets nervous. 

“Hey, guys, we have some guests,” she says, spinning around in her chair. Oliver and Diggle straighten up immediately, both fingering their weapons as they scan the perimeter, looking for some villain who’s infiltrated the Lair and taken her hostage. Instead, they see Oliver’s friends and sister standing in the corner, arms crossed and looking unimpressed. 

“Really? This is what you’ve been doing with your time, Ollie?” Laurel asks. “I mean, I get different coping mechanisms, but vigilantism is a  _ felony _ .”

“I--what?” he says, staring at them with his mouth hanging open. “What’re you guys--I mean. It’s… cosplay? I have a secret love of cosplay. I was at a convention just now; Diggle went with me because he’s a massive dork.”

Diggle elbowed him in the ribs and his breath flew out of him in a  _ whoosh _ . “I mean, he’s so cool he made cosplay popular.”

“Better, but still not good,” Diggle muttered under his breath. 

“Come on, man, we’re not stupid,” Tommy says, frowning at his best friend. “You’re obviously the Arrow. I just want to know why you didn’t tell us. And before you continue with the pathetic lies, you should know Felicity already filled us in.” 

Felicity gave a helpless shrug from where she sat, as if to say  _ sorry, there wasn’t much I could do _ . 

Oliver sighs, unstringing his bow and placing it back in the box from Lian Yu. “I just didn’t want you guys in any danger. On the off chance it ever got connected back to me, I figured the less you knew the safer you’d be.”

“Yeah, well, that’s bullshit, and we know now anyways. So are you going to catch us up or what?”

Oliver huffs out a breath, sitting down and closing his eyes for just a moment. “I’ll tell you the basics, but you guys really shouldn’t be involved in this.”

“Not a chance,” Thea snorts. “Whatever you’re doing, I’m in. I have a feeling there’s a hell of a story behind this.”

Oliver feels himself smile wryly. “You have no idea.”

_ Look at this _ , he imagines the professor saying as he stands in the darkness, looming over Shado’s grave. He’s never felt so simultaneously small and powerless and guilty, rage blotting everything else out.  _ A prime example of a monster _ . 

  
  


Years later, in the aftermath of the desert, when they all sit around in the living room passing takeout containers and bowls of popcorn and those too-white frosted sugar cookies from the store, Maseo asks. “So, did you ever go back to school like you wanted to?”

The half dozen heads sitting around them snap towards him, and Oliver groans. 

“I told you that in confidence, man. You’re breaking the sacred oath of trust between brothers.”

Maseo’s eyes glint with amusement, and something tells Oliver it was no accident that he brought this up in front of the rest of them.  _ Payback _ , the other man’s face seems to say. All that comes out of his mouth is an unapologetic “oops”. 

“You wanted to go back to school, Ollie?” Thea askes. 

“You  _ went  _ to school?” Felicity demands at the same time. 

Oliver buries his face in his hands and wishes for a different family. 

  
  


“I don’t know why they keep dying,” Felicity says with a frown, running a finger along a droopy brown leaf. Oliver bites back a smile. This is the third fern in the last month she’s killed, two by under watering and one by overwatering. It hasn’t slowed her down in the slightest--every time another plant dies, she hosts a plant funeral and comes back with a new named plant the next day, a kind of fiery determination in her features. 

This one was named Mattais. He wonders at what point they’ll have to clear off more wall space for the “plant graveyard”, which is really just a list of names carved into the concrete. It’s terrifyingly disturbing if you don’t know the context; Oliver is acutely aware of this because the last time Thea’d come down and noticed it she had shrieked a little and said  _ holy shit what is that, it’s giving me major serial killer vibes _ . 

“It’s the watering schedule,” Oliver explains, the edges of his lips quirking up. “It depends on the plant, of course, but it wouldn’t hurt to get a bigger pot or some fast-draining soil, either.” 

Felicity paused, turning around to glance back at him skeptically. “Since when are you good at plants?”

“Since always,” he said, laughing a little, “I did grow up with a massive garden in my backyard. Mom used to take Thea and I out there to walk around. Besides, there were some wild herbs on the island that I got growing for a little while.”

She stared at him for a minute, utter bewilderment sprawled across her face. “Every time I learn something new about you, I get more confused.”

“Would you believe me if I told you I’d heard that before?”

In Hong Kong, he spends random hours being summoned by Waller--she’ll give him an assignment at two in the morning, then call him out again at 10 and 3, before disappearing for three days. The radio silence never lasts, but for however long it does, he spends sunny afternoons helping Akio with his homework and learning how to cook from Tatsu. At first, she was less than impressed by his attempts to help her kid, but Oliver remembers all the thousand ways his tutors had tried (and mostly failed) to walk him through the math problems Akio is working on, and after the first few times, her shoulders don’t stiffen quite as much. 

It feels good, in a quiet kind of way. Like something from his previous life wasn’t a complete waste. 

Learning from Tatsu feels less good, but that’s only because his forearms are bruised from all the wacks she gives him with whatever instrument of brutality is in her hands that day. She watches with narrowed eyes as he overcooks noodles and barks orders at him while he chops things into uneven chunks, but he keeps coming back to ask her to teach him. One night, when he comes staggering home, he washes the blood off his hands in the bathroom and then crosses the living room in uneven steps. He makes it to the kitchen, where he leans against the counter and watches Tatsu with heavy eyes. 

“What are we making tonight?”

“ _ We  _ are not making anything. I don’t want you getting blood all over the food.”

“Tatsu, please,” he says, his shoulders slumping, “I promise my hands are clean. Please let me help.”

She puts the lid on top of the pot with more force than necessary and he flinches a little. “Why? Why do you keep doing this?”

Oliver is quiet for a moment, his gaze distant and loosely aimed toward the floor. “Because I need to know that I can still do something other than kill.”

Tatsu stares at him, unblinking and uncowed. Her eyes skirt over to where Maseo is standing in the corner, his face softer than usual. After a moment, she gives an exaggerated sigh. 

“Fine. But only because you look like a kicked puppy. And if you chop the ginger wrong again, Amanda Waller will be the  _ least  _ of your problems.”

“This is  _ so _ cool!” Curtis says, the first time that he wanders down into the bunker that  _ no one was supposed to be able to find _ . “Why do you guys have a garden?”

Oliver sighs through his nose. Ever since Felicity ordered the planter box and sun lights, more and more have been migrating in--he’ll come in one day and there will be a new plant waiting to be put in the soil. At first he thought it was funny, but these days it’s the only thing anyone comments on. A few days ago when Quentin came down, he stopped yelling halfway through the lecture on interrogation protocols to ask about the new Zanzibar Gem. 

(Which, okay, that had actually been kind of a nice distraction, but the point stands.)

It’s distracting, to say the least. While Felicity and Diggle rush around the bunker, trying to track down suspects, more and more of his time is being taken up by carefully watering and trimming each plant, making sure no parasites or illnesses are weakening them. He keeps catching Felicity watching him garden out of the corner of his eye, and he doesn’t quite know what to make of that. 

_ Oh _ , he thinks a few months later. It’s just him and Felicity in the bunker for once, everyone else out patrolling or going on awkward double dates. A few minutes ago, she put down her tablet with a huff, told him he was kind of an idiot, and started kissing him senseless. A lot of things click into place all at once, and he’s sitting there thinking  _ oh _ . 

(Pretty soon, he isn’t thinking anything at all.)

It takes three and a half years--until after Maseo brought it up that night, the traitor--for Oliver to re-enroll in college. It’s not exactly like he pictured it--he’s still running around at night as the Green Arrow, so it’s not like essays and tests are the  _ top  _ of his priority list--but it’s good. He goes to class and sits in the back row of 300 person lecture halls, does his homework (mostly) on time, and occasionally meets up for coffees and studying with his less-starstruck classmates. 

It’s not always fun, and just because it’s easier than the rest of his life doesn’t mean it’s easy. But he does it, every day--he pulls himself up and attends class, goes to meetings both as a businessman and as a student, and spends his nights saving the city. It’s messy and hard and leaves him exhausted at the end of every night. 

And yet, spending early morning fresh off patrol deep in the stacks of the library, Oliver feels himself smiling more than before. Whether he’s taking notes in class or flying over the city on a zipline or frantically pressing the close door button on the elevator because he is  _ so unbelievably late _ , he functions on a mixture of caffeine and that same willpower that got him through those five years away. His life is chaotic and full of pain and terror and countless hours studying. 

For the first time in a long time, it feels like  _ his _ . 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a while ago and held off on posting because it didn't feel quite complete, but I think it's about as good as it's going to get. I hope you guys liked it! Let me know if anyone has any good fluffy team-as-family arrow fics; I could always use more. <3


End file.
